Doctors remove giant hairball from 12-yr-old’s stomach in Thane's Kalyan

Shreelaxmi Kanojiya developed the habit of eating hair when she was two years old

Twelve-year-old Shreelaxmi Kanojiya had developed the habit of eating hair when she was a two-year-old, but when she continued, it led to a massive hairball forming in her stomach. However, doctors at a Kalyan-based hospital successfully removed the 15x18 cm mass through an open surgery, last Friday.

Her parents said that she had got into the habit of eating hair at a very young age, but they did not know that she was still doing it. Shreelaxmi's father Vinod Kanojiya said, "She developed the habit at the age of two. She would even pick hair off the floor and eat it. Once we scolded her, so she stopped doing it in front of us."

Moving mass

While all these years Shreelaxmi didn't have any physical complaints apart from episodes of stomach pain, it was only last week when she told her parents about a mass moving in her abdomen.

"Whenever she had a stomach ache, we thought it was some fungal infection and doctors, too, treated her for the same. We stopped giving her outside food. Of late, the frequency of stomach pain complaints increased. When she told us about some mass in her abdomen, we got worried. It moved to whichever side she bent. It was quite hard and felt unusual. We showed it to our doctor who suggested a sonography," added Vinod.

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Post the sonography they got to know that the stomach pain and vomiting were happening because of the hairball.

"When she was brought to us last week, the CT scan report showed a tightly packed hair mass. The mass was so huge that there was no space left in her stomach to accommodate anything else. She was in pain and unable to eat anything," said Dr Rohit Paryani, laproscopic surgeon at Starcity Multispeciality Hospital, Kalyan. He said normally a child of Shreelaxmi's age should weigh around 42 kilos but she was malnourished and weighed only 20 kg.

Open surgery

While the doctors wanted to try a minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, the fear of hair getting stuck in the instrument used for the procedure discouraged them and they opted for an open surgery. The mass weighed around 650 gm, said Dr Paryani.

He said usually if people accidentally ingest a small amount of hair, they excrete it. "When there is constant ingestion, the hair settles in the stomach causing trichobezoar [hair in the stomach]," he added.

Doctors said trichobezoar is commonly seen in teenagers (girls). There are about 100 reports of trichobezoar in English medical literature. Stomach trichobezoar is a hair ball or hair mass formed in the stomach due to trichophagia (eating of hair) and trichotillomania (irresistible desire to pull hair till it is broken).

650gm
Weight of the hairball